Mind, Body, and Technology
What does it mean to have a body? I asked myself this question while reading Anne Pasek’s paper on the Xbox Kinect. Pasek describes the Kinect and its technology as impressive, comparing the Kinect’s 3D motion capture techniques to human eyes. It is able to recognize up to two players and their environment with the use of parallel visual sensors. Like some amphibians’ eyes, the sensors can move up and down to better calibrate the dimensions of the room and play at hand. This technology is easy to connect with because the Kinect’s detection process is similar to living beings’ processes of seeing, analyzing, and mapping an environment. Does this mean that the Xbox Kinect can be classified as a living being then? The short answer is no, though Pasek provides a better explanation of its non-human components:
The device possesses at once both a vividly animate method of interacting with its environment, and yet also its own nonhuman phenomenological lifeworld. If animation is the core foundation of consciousness, then the behavioral motion and decision-making of the device seem to adhere to this category as much as any simple organic life form. Unlike its biological counterpoints, however, the Kinect’s unique bodily intelligence is further supplemented by algorithmic, probabilistic data.
In class, we talked about what the body is in relation to the mind and the world. To put it simply, there is no distinction between them — people are embedded in the world and participate in it through their bodies. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty expresses, there is no distinction between the mind and the body because the mind cannot exist without the body. I was surprised at first to hear that Plato’s ideas were challenged by someone I had never heard about. Ponty proved to have stronger existentialist ideas though, and slowly Plato’s all too familiar concepts about reality and being in the world became less attractive to me. For instance, the realization that the nature of one’s body determines their reality gave me a whole new perspective on design and accessibility. I have regarded good design as something that is widely accessible and can be used easily by most. It is highly unlikely that I could ever design something that 100% of the population can utilize. For those of us lucky enough to be able-bodied, the embodiment of a task, such as tying our shoelaces, further enhances the body’s relation to the world. The body knows the world in such a way that the mind leads and the body follows.
Emotions play a pivotal part in the conduction of our bodies. They can change the way we think by clouding our rationality. For example, going into an interview when you’ve had a bad day might make others perceive you as nervous, annoying, or lacking confidence. You also start noticing things you might have not noticed before, such as the way the interviewer repeatedly clicks on their pen or tapping of the foot. I like to go back to the days I used to compete in fencing, and how much my emotions would affect my performance. Back then, my coach would tell me that my anger and frustrations were all “in my head”; now I understand that the mind leads and the body follows.
Going back to the question of Xbox Kinect, I can confidently identify the Kinect as a tool that augments my gaming experience. In other words, a capacitation. The Kinect is one technologically advanced object, but even simpler objects can be classified as capacitations. Don Idhe supports this idea by claiming that technology mediates between us and the world, and in doing so, transforms us and our relation to the world. For example, think about how your glasses mediate your perception of reality. Technology also has intentionality; your glasses help you see better, but there are things that they don’t do well, like stay on your nose or prevent fogginess. No matter what technology augments, enhances, substitutes, or mediates, humans are incredibly different from technology because we have a mind and a body that interact with the world.
